Profile

I am a historian of the Atlantic World, with a particular focus on the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. My 2023 monograph Traders in Men: Merchants and the Transformation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (Yale University Press)revealed how slave-trading merchants massively expanded the slave trade during the eighteenth century and powerfully shaped the experiences of millions of enslaved people. Traders in Men won the 2024 James A. Rawley Prize in Atlantic History from the American Historical Association, and was a finalist for the Wolfson History Prize, the Hagley Prize in Business History; the Paul Lovejoy Prize; and the Slaveryarchive book prize.

My second book project, “Firearm Frontiers: Enslavement and Environmental Change on the Edges of Britain’s Empire,” examines the global trade in firearms to indigenous peoples. It will study the differing ways that Native groups adopted gunpowder technology into warfare, enslavement, and everyday life, with enduring impacts on indigenous societies, cultures, and economies. Firearm Frontiers will also consider how indigenous agency shaped Britain’s armaments industry and the global trade networks that fed it—illuminating Native consumers' crucial role in making the modern world.

Beyond these book projects, I have written extensively on the history of slavery in the British and French Atlantic Worlds in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly, Past & Present, and the Journal of Economic History. Two of these works have received “best article” prizes.

Outside of my published work, I have helped develop four major digital humanities projects: I am co-editor of the AHRC- and NEH-funded project Slave Voyages, a digital memorial to the 12.5 million Africans who were forcibly transported through the slave trade; principal investigator on the AHRC and NEH funded “Towards a Digital Archive of the Atlantic Slave Trades: Unlocking the Records of the South Sea Company;” co-investigator of the AHRC-funded Legacies of British Slave Traders project; and I developed digital models of two French slave ships.